


distant shots and passing trucks

by deadendtracks (amonitrate)



Series: Idiot Prayer [3]
Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Drinking, Emetophobia, Hiding Medical Issues, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Missing Scene, Physical Disability, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Season/Series 04, Seizures, Smoking, Sort Of, i mean it's tommy and alfie so there's more guns than comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-25
Updated: 2019-06-27
Packaged: 2020-05-19 06:02:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 12,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19350958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amonitrate/pseuds/deadendtracks
Summary: Alfie had no ready explanation for what he and Tommy had been doing before Tommy’s lights had gone out, because Tommy Shelby had the worst timing of any man Alfie had ever met, let alone fucked.At least they was both fully dressed this time.Missing scene from 4.04. Alfie has a lot of feelings, Tommy is on a deadline, and everyone is a bit prickly.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A sequel to _Hail from old water_. You probably don't have to read the previous story to understand this one, but it would definitely add a lot of context.
> 
> There's a [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5Yf8W8ae0qwC1aaOlQaikN) for this one.
> 
> Thanks as always to @veneredirimmel for beta!

Please note I do not consent to have my work hosted on or accessed by any third party app or site. If you are seeing this fanfiction anywhere but archiveofourown it has been reposted or accessed without my permission. Please be aware that I am strongly against this type of app and ask that you access my fic directly via AO3 in the future. I am including this message in the body of the text because apparently these apps strip out notes.

* * *

* * *

 

As Alfie Solomons stared down the barrel of the gun stuck in his face, two facts became abruptly clear.

Fact the first: Tommy Shelby must have gone off his medication again. 

Fact the second: his family had no fucking idea about the fits. 

The third thought that ran lightning quick through Alfie’s mind was more conjecture than fact, but it seemed entirely obvious that Fact One had to do with the starlings, didn’t it. The mafia.

Fact Two, now that was murkier, but not precisely a surprise if Alfie had given it any consideration, which he hadn’t previously had reason to do, had he. And now here was Tommy on the floor at his feet, flopping like a fish just dumped from the net, and here was his brother Arthur with the gun and a snarl and wide panicked eyes. 

So maybe his ignorance of Fact Two had been an oversight on his part. The kind of oversight that might get him shot in the fucking face.

Alfie had time for two more quick realizations: one, if Tommy hadn’t sent the table laden with gin bottles and other miscellaneous shit crashing to the floor as he’d fallen, the whole thing would most likely have been over before anyone else had been the wiser. And two, Alfie had no ready explanation for what he and Tommy had been doing before Tommy’s lights had gone out, because Tommy Shelby had the worst timing of any man Alfie had ever met, let alone fucked.

At least they was both fully dressed this time. 

“What the fuck are you laughing at?” Arthur’s voice was likely a mite higher-pitched than he realized, which had the effect of redoubling Alfie’s sudden and entirely inappropriate case of hysterics.

“Not a laughing matter, is it,” Alfie agreed. He lifted his hands in the air. “Before you shoot me, would you be so kind as to check the time.”

Arthur took a fraction of a second to sputter at that before his eyes darted back to his brother, who’d started making the quiet choking sound that had nearly sent Alfie calling for an ambulance the last time. 

“Why the bloody hell do you need to know the time? What the fuck did you do to him, Solomons?”

Anger made a belated showing, itchy hot up the back of Alfie’s neck. Fucking Tommy Shelby shaking like he’d grasped a live wire was not a thing Alfie had ever had a desire to watch again, let alone take the blame for from the man’s rabid older brother. 

“Because if this don’t stop soon you’ll need to tell them how long it’s lasted when you call the fucking medics. Last time he nearly seized himself into his grave,” he snapped. Or his fucking pyre, Alfie supposed. Except a year had passed and he had no idea if that had been the last time, did he? Odds were good it hadn’t been. And fuck, he’d-- now he’d have to give some explanation for just how he’d come to know what the hell was happening in the first place.

“Jesus Christ.” Arthur appeared to have made an internal calculation that didn’t end with him trusting Alfie exactly but did lead him to holster the fucking gun. “What the fuck is going on?”

Alfie risked the very real chance Arthur might shoot him on reflex and fished his watch from his waistcoat pocket. Maybe ten seconds had passed between Tommy going down and Arthur storming into the makeshift distillery with all the fury of hell, and at least thirty more after that taken up by shouting. So all told a bit less than a minute, and no sign the fit was slowing. 

Shit.

“You want to be useful? Make sure your brother don’t slice himself up any more than he already has on all that fucking glass, yeah?”

Alfie hadn’t had time to try to move Tommy away from the shattered bottles or the overturned table, and he didn’t think Arthur would let him get within two feet now. But Arthur just stood there, gaping down at his brother. Alfie got it, he did. Last time he’d felt much the same, and Tommy hadn’t given him the chance to adjust before he was trying to breathe in his own vomit. Then the manic circuits in his brain had started the whole bloody operation over again.

“Jesus fuck,” Arthur said, softer, as he kicked broken glass away from Tommy with jerky sweeps of one boot, then squatted down next to him, a hand hovering over his shoulder like he was afraid touching him might make things worse. 

“Turn him on his side, mate. So he don’t choke.” 

Arthur didn’t question the order, just rolled his brother’s convulsing body gently onto his side. There were smears of blood on the concrete but Alfie couldn’t see where Tommy might have cut himself. Behind the round lenses of his glasses his eyelids were half open, showing only white, his face stretched into a rictus, and despite having seen it before that still turned Alfie’s guts to water. The spasms seemed a hell of a lot more violent this time, but maybe that was because he was seeing things from a less intimate angle and the whole start to the fit had been a bit more dramatic. 

One moment they’d been circling each other, metaphorically speaking, nearly close enough to breathe each other’s air, then Tommy had frowned. A distracted sort of fear flitting across his face, he’d taken an unsteady step away from Alfie and just stood there for a moment, stare lost somewhere inward, before collapsing backwards into the fucking table like he’d meant to take a seat and drunkenly misjudged the distance. Except he hadn’t been drinking, had he, or not enough to make him observably impaired. Which maybe didn’t mean a lot, but Tommy wasn’t in the habit of drinking when there was business to be done. Or hadn’t used to be, anyway.

Not that what they’d been negotiating had much to do with business.

One of Tommy’s arms shot away from his chest, hand twisting stiffly at the wrist, the choking sound gone harsh as Arthur struggled to keep him on his side.

“Fuck, Tommy.” Arthur glanced up at Alfie, half suspicious, half pleading, but accepting that Alfie somehow possessed superior knowledge about the situation at hand. “How long’s it go on like this?”

Alfie lifted a shoulder. “First time I only caught the end and it was a couple of minutes before he came round. Second time… second time was longer.” 

Arthur wasn’t even trying to hide his horror. 

“Just have to wait it out. Unless it don’t stop, then you call the fucking ambulance. There a phone in this shack?”

Arthur shook his head. “It’s a fucking stable. Might be one in the office next door.”

There was no way in hell Arthur would leave his brother long enough to make a call, was there, which left Alfie, who wasn’t moving quickly these days and had no idea where the phone might be. Fuck.

Minute ten. Minute thirty. Fifteen seconds more and the jerking stuttered and slowed to a quiver and then Tommy’s body went limp against the concrete floor, at just under the two minute mark. The glasses had been knocked askew, wire earpiece bent and pulled free from his ear, one of the lenses scuffed and cracked. There was bloody froth leaking at the corner of his mouth, so he’d probably bit his tongue, but the contents of his stomach apparently planned to stay where they were this time.

Fuck. 

“Now what?” 

Alfie would have come up with something scathing to say to that, if he weren’t all at once completely done in. 

Tommy’s eyes were still half open, a bit of color just showing beneath the heavy lids now. With a delicacy that seemed unlikely in a man of his temperament, Arthur plucked the wire frames away and brushed a hank of hair back from his brother’s face. Tommy let out a confused sound at the touch, one of his hands drifting up to clumsily bat away the intrusion. Alfie supposed that meant he was making his way toward coming around, but it was bound to take awhile, so he picked up the cane he’d dropped when the whole mess started and hobbled his way over to the chair that had somehow remained upright next to the overturned table. Sank down into it, biting back a groan. 

“Solomons--” Arthur said, but Tommy was already struggling to push up from the floor, heaving for air like a horse just come through a race. Arthur put a hand on his shoulder. “Tom, just… stay still a minute.” Tommy flailed out wildly. “Tom--”

“Leave him be, just make sure he don’t hurt himself,” Alfie said. 

Drawing his legs up like he thought he was going somewhere but didn’t quite know how to get there, Tommy let out a frustrated grunt when Arthur pressed him back towards the floor. Didn’t look like he’d pissed himself this time, or if he had it wasn’t enough to soak through his trousers. 

“Tommy… fuck. Stay down, alright?” Tommy’s eyes rolled towards Arthur’s voice on reflex, but he fought aimlessly against the attempt to restrain him, not coordinated enough to get himself off the floor but determined to move nevertheless, driven by some atavistic instinct. Alfie’s brother had done this too, sometimes, in the aftermath. Never had gotten anywhere, but had punched Alfie in the nose once in the trying. It went on like that for another minute or two while Tommy’s rough gasps for air wound down to a pant, his mouth hanging open. Then all at once he was sort of there again, something of himself seeping back into his eyes.

“...the fuck…” he mumbled, mostly to the floor, then crumpled forward, coughing. He managed to prop himself up on one elbow and was blinking like a man who’d just made his exit from a long tunnel into the sunlight. 

Alfie’d half expected Arthur to start shouting again, but instead he bent over his brother like he might a toddler who’d taken a spill, one hand under his arm, the other gentle on his back. “Take it easy, Tom. Take it slow, yeah?”

Once he was more or less upright he peered at Alfie with a muddled sort of puzzlement like he recognized him from somewhere but couldn’t yet place his face. 

“You’ll be alright,” Arthur said, and it was at least half question. Tommy’s head swiveled, turning his stunned befuddlement onto his brother. There was a nasty scratch down the side of his neck, disappearing into his collar, and one of his hands was bleeding. “What’s wrong with him?” This was definitely a question, and aimed Alfie’s way. “This normal?”

“Got a few wires crossed still is all,” Alfie said. As for what was wrong with him, Alfie had his guesses, but beyond the obvious Tommy had never precisely said.

Arthur had a handkerchief out and was wiping the blood from Tommy’s mouth and the fact that Tommy allowed it spoke for itself, his face unnervingly open in its utter exhaustion, graceless and stripped of its usual tight mask.

“Arthur,” Tommy ground out finally, squinting. He didn’t sound entirely certain he had it right. 

“Yeah, it’s me,” Arthur said. “C’mon, let’s get you up.”

Alfie considered warning him away from that plan, but leaving Tommy to fall asleep where he was on the glass-sparkled concrete floor didn’t seem any better, did it, and Arthur’s voice had the desperate sort of edge that wouldn’t hear any objections anyhow. Alfie’d seen it often enough on the battlefield, yeah, there’d be no listening to logic there. Even so it was easier said than done; Tommy couldn’t get his legs under him and this only fed Arthur’s attempt to force things into some kind of normality, so it took a couple of tries. By the end Arthur was holding his brother vertical by sheer force of will and Tommy’d gone sallow as old newsprint. 

The next bit came barely intelligible. “--rama Gold--” 

“They’ve been and gone, Tommy.” 

He was more out of it than he’d been after the fit at the boxing ring, had clearly lost some time, but not as much as he had the night he’d gone into two seizures without a break and hadn’t recognized Alfie at all in the aftermath. Hadn’t been able to speak at first, either, feeble as a gutshot soldier, so Alfie supposed this wasn’t so bad.

“You should get him someplace he can sleep.” Alfie said, because Tommy didn’t seem aware enough to give any sort of guidance and if the last two times had been anything to go by, a crash was coming, soon. “And see if he’s still got his fucking medication stashed away somewhere, because my guess is he’s not taking it.”

Arthur stared at his brother like he’d just met him. “Medication?” 

Tommy lifted a bleary glare to Alfie. So he’d followed that much of the conversation, then. 

“Yeah, Tommy,” Alfie said. “Stopped your fucking pills again, didn’t you.”

“Fuckoff,” Tommy muttered. Then he swayed away from them, bent at the waist, and was quietly sick.

 

Tommy was staggering like the walking wounded by the time Arthur got him up the stairs and into the stable proper, and there wasn’t much Alfie could do to help prop him up, given his  own afflictions. He was barely managing to haul himself along behind them, leaning on his cane with every step, drained like he’d been struck down with the fucking flu.

“Just a little farther to the car, then we’ll get you home,” Arthur was saying, panting under the strain of holding his brother upright as Tommy sagged against him, stumbling, and almost took them both down. Alfie knew from experience the bastard was heavier than he looked. 

Tommy shook his head and mumbled something and Arthur let out a breathless laugh. “I’m not leaving you on a bloody bale of hay. For fuck’s sake.”

“Where Curly sleeps... when there’s foaling,” was Tommy’s next hoarse suggestion, and it was certainly a combination of words that were all in English, Alfie supposed, but Arthur was nodding so it must have meant something coherent to him.

Turned out the stables belonged to their uncle, who had an office equipped with a cot the next building over.

By the looks of it Tommy was out before Arthur’d even got him down on the narrow cot at the back of the cramped room, which seemed less like an office than it did someone’s rustic country shack, complete with old fashioned wood stove. There wasn’t much in the way of space so Alfie hovered in the doorway while Arthur rekindled the fire in the stove and pulled a rough wool blanket over his brother and then stood staring down at him. When he’d passed out in Alfie’s car that first time he’d been so heavily asleep he hadn’t roused when Alfie had Ollie and Daniel haul him into the bakery between them like a sack of potatoes. 

“You,” Arthur hissed, needlessly quiet as he jabbed a finger in Alfie’s direction. “Outside.”

Alfie took a moment to snuff an impulse to bristle at the order, then turned and limped back the way he’d come. He wasn’t sure what the fuck he was still doing here, except that he seemed to be the only one who had any notion of what to do with a seizing Brummie bookmaker. Part of him found that vaguely amusing. The rest was seething with something that might have been tangled up with resentment, something he didn’t intend to look at more closely. Being dragged into Shelby family drama hadn’t exactly been part of his plans for the day. He had his own set of troubles to worry about, didn’t he.

Once he reached daylight again Alfie turned and planted his cane in front of him. “Right,” he said. 

Arthur Shelby’s face ran through a quick series of expressions before settling on suspicion, but underneath it all the thread of panic remained.

“What the fuck was all that, then?” 

“That, mate, was a grand mal seizure.”

“Ain’t your fucking mate,” Arthur snarled, but it was only half-hearted. “What d’you know about it?”

There was any number of responses Alfie could have given to that question. He went with the bit of honesty that might let him escape questions of the sort he didn’t care to dance around with a man so quick to pull a gun. “Had a brother with epilepsy when we was kids.”

Arthur frowned. “Tommy don’t have epilepsy.”

“Smashed his fucking skull, though, didn’t he?” This was where the guesswork came in, but the clues were obvious enough to string together.

“Jesus,” Arthur muttered, swiping a hand over his face, then turned a sharper look on Alfie. “You seen this happen before. Seen Tommy have one of these fits.” 

Seemed safest just to nod. 

“How long’s it been going on?” Like Alfie was Tommy Shelby’s fucking physician.

“Dunno, but I found him like that in the fucking men’s room a year ago, so I’d say it’s been a good long while.” 

“When we was locked up,” Arthur said to himself. Then: “I should get him to the fucking hospital.”

Alfie should let him do it just on general principle after the day he’d had, because he knew how pissed off it would make Tommy to wake up surrounded by doctors. Instead he sighed. “Nah, mate, don’t bother, not unless it happens again today.” 

“What…” Arthur ran a hand through his hair. “Fuck.”

Alfie took pity on him. “Keep an eye on him. He’ll sleep awhile, yeah, and then he’ll be alright. Might feel like shit.”

“You said something about medicine,” Arthur said, creeping up on accusatory again. “Why the hell would he stop taking medicine for this if he’s got it?”

Alfie might have his suspicions as to why Tommy had stopped taking his pills, but he wasn’t about to step into that minefield now, was he?  “Yeah, well, that’s something to take up with your fucking madman of a brother, innit, because it’s his business why he wants to go around forcing innocent bystanders to deal with his fucking fits on a regular basis.”

At least Arthur had been too gobsmacked to wonder what he and Tommy had been up to before Tommy’d so rudely and spectacularly interrupted things by toppling over into the detritus of his current hobby.

Fucking hell.


	2. Chapter 2

Alfie sent his driver and his nephew off back to London and checked himself into the Midlands Hotel and didn’t let himself think too closely on why he’d chosen to stay in fucking Birmingham after the afternoon he’d had. Stretched out on the bed and tried to take a nap even, but sleep didn’t come, which was how he’d ended up at a little table overlooking the hotel’s attempt at a posh entrance hall at tea time. So he had a clear view when Tommy Shelby showed up, moving through the gleaming space like a pensioner forty years his senior. 

He watched as Tommy made an inquiry at the front desk and then turned, peering upward, picking out Alfie immediately despite his lack of spectacles, like he knew the place well enough to have guessed right off the bat where Alfie might be seated. Then he waited as Tommy mounted the wide staircase, using the marble railing to haul himself up the way he had that night at Alfie’s house after the boxing match, weariness obvious in the bowed head and the line of his shoulders when he thought no one was watching. 

Alfie knew all about that game, didn’t he. 

At the top of the stairs Tommy had a word with the maitre d’ and then sat himself down at Alfie’s table without so much as a by your leave, miraculously restored to his usual arrogant posture like nothing at all ever affected him.

“You look like warmed over dog shit,” Alfie said in greeting.

Tommy cocked his head, and hell if there wasn’t a hint of humor there. “I’m fine, Alfie, thank you.”

He did though. Look like shit. Had his cap pulled low, but it didn’t hide the lingering pallor or the scrape from the cement floor along his cheekbone or the bruise purpling the edge of his jaw or the bags under his eyes, though the bags had been there before the fit, hadn’t they. The bags were a long-term project. The scratch down the side of his neck wasn’t as serious as it had looked in the distillery but was still an angry red, and there was a length of bandage wound around his left hand.

“You’re looking well, yourself,” Tommy said, with the casual edge that meant he’d intended to make some kind of fucking point. Alfie hadn’t come within a hundred kilometers of looking well for a solid year, and knew it. The rash alone ruled out looking fucking _well,_ and the rash was the least of his ailments _._

“What the fuck are you doing here, anyway?” Had anyone been taking bets on the matter, Alfie would have put money on Tommy sleeping through to morning, but it hadn’t been more than four hours, and here he was. 

The waiter appeared bearing a cut glass tumbler and a matching ashtray, so of course Tommy busied himself with lighting up instead of answering. “I could ask the same of you,” he said eventually.

“Hiding out from your family, then.” Alfie nodded to himself and watched Tommy sip at his drink. “Suppose Arthur’s told the lot of them about this afternoon’s little adventure by now, yeah?”

That scored a hit. Tommy glanced away, down at the shiny marble floor of the lobby below. “Not yet,” he admitted. 

Now that, that was interesting. “What’d you have to promise to buy his silence?”

“Nothing,” Tommy said. “It’s not a good time to spread panic.”

Right. “The American, you mean.”

Tommy hummed in agreement, staring off into the middle distance. He failed to elaborate, which wasn’t a fucking surprise.

“Tommy,” Alfie said finally. “Why don’t you get to whatever it is brought you here.”

Tommy blinked and turned back to him. “I suspect we didn’t finish our earlier discussion.”

Alfie stared at him. “So you remember that part.”

Tommy lifted a shoulder. Maybe he remembered, maybe he just knew the direction of his original intentions. 

Fucking hell, Alfie thought, but what he said was: “Not sure this is the best time for that sort of thing.”

There was a brittle set to Tommy’s jaw that hadn’t been there before the fit, and he seemed entirely unaware of the tremor in his left hand as he took a drag on his cigarette and blew the smoke towards the ceiling. If he was capable of getting it up at all at the moment, Alfie’d fucking eat his own hat. 

“Time’s not about to get any...” 

Whatever it was he’d meant to say, he didn’t continue. A moment drifted past with nothing more forthcoming. 

“Tommy,” Alfie prodded. 

The ash at the end of his cigarette lengthened in the silence, then crumbled to the table top.

Tommy’s eyelids fluttered. He swallowed and blinked and stared down at his cigarette before stubbing the thing out in the ashtray, half smoked, then immediately lit another. If you didn’t know better, didn’t know the signs, you might have suspected he’d only lost his train of thought, gotten tangled up in one of his many current sources of stress.

Fucking shitfire hell. “Go home and get some fucking sleep.”

Tommy just shook his head. 

“I’m not a bloody nanny,” Alfie snapped. “Do you even know you’re having seizures while you sit here smoking your cigarettes and propositioning me?”

Tommy frowned, dismissive. “The fuck are you--”

“There’s more than one kind of fit, yeah, and not all of them are the dramatic sort that even you can’t fucking ignore.” Tommy stared at him. “Anyone accuse you of not listening to what they’re saying lately, of ignoring them?”

The corner of Tommy’s mouth lifted, but his eyes had narrowed, like he thought Alfie was trying to pull one over on him. 

“Yeah, right, Tommy Shelby don’t listen to nothing nobody fucking says anyhow, so why should that seem at all out of the ordinary.”

The half smile slid from Tommy’s face and he swallowed most of his drink in one go. “I’ll let you know when we have a date for the match with Goliath,” he said, and shoved his chair back.

Alfie leaned across the table before he could stand. “I can guess why you’ve ditched the fucking pills, mate, but your brain is skipping out on you five or ten seconds at a time, fuck knows how many times a fucking day.”

Tommy wouldn’t look at him. “And?”

“Ten seconds is a long fucking time in a firefight, innit.”

At that, Tommy knocked back the dregs of his drink, pushed himself up from his chair, and stalked away.

 

Bad night, yeah, one he could have seen coming if he hadn’t been occupied with other matters. Maybe it was the day’s unexpected excitement, maybe it was the fact the excitement he had expected had been cut short. Maybe it was just that his overall stamina for any kind of excitement at all wasn’t near what it had been even a year ago, but sleep didn’t come and by dawn his usual aches and pains were held together with razor wire. 

Some mornings it didn’t matter he had more important places to be, some mornings his body dictated his schedule. He ordered tea from room service and soaked in a hot bath until his muscles unclenched enough he could straighten as much as he was capable of these days, which was somewhere in the neighborhood of the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Weren’t much he could do for the rash; he’d brought a satchel with him in case he had reason to stay, with a change of clothing and all his various medications and salves, but at this point it was a losing battle, wasn’t it. One he dutifully fought, because of course he did, what else was he going to do? But reality wasn’t something Alfie was in the habit of denying.

He’d fully intended to check out of the hotel and get himself a seat on the morning train back to London. Somehow failed to accomplish either of those things, instead hailing a cab, the driver of which gave him a bit of lip at the address, but didn’t put up a fuss after Alfie handed over a wad of cash in advance. So. Watery Lane, Small Heath, and the smell that hadn’t improved one whit from the previous morning. Pig and ash and shit and piss, yeah, most of these rowhouses hadn’t come within fifty years of indoor plumbing. If it had been him with the mafia after his hide, he’d have rather just taken the bullet. 

No sign of life from the windows but the door opened before he had the chance to knock and the kid brother peered out at him, then past him to the taxi idling at the kerb. 

“Yeah?” the kid challenged. 

There was a revolver dangling from one of his hands, at the end of one of his gangly arms. Alfie supposed he should count himself lucky he didn’t have the thing pointed in his face, which would make two Shelby brothers threatening to shoot him two days running, and that would just be too much to handle with any kind of patience, now, wouldn’t it.

“Tommy in?” Alfie leaned on his cane and wished he’d done the smart fucking thing and gone home.

“Dunno if he’s up yet,” the kid admitted, before the suspicion he should have approached matters with in the first place belatedly blossomed in his face. “Who’s asking?”

“What, Arthur take a holiday from guard dog duty?” 

The kid’s mouth screwed up like he knew he was missing something and was used to the feeling. He turned away from the door and hollered up the stairs. “Tom? Somebody here for you.”

“Oi,” the cabbie was leaning out his window. “You staying or what?”

Alfie dug in his pocket and found a ten pound note and turned to hold it out in front of the driver by two corners, waving it a little. “Five minutes, mate, and this is yours, whether or not I take your shining chariot for the return trip, yeah?”

When he got himself turned back around the kid was still blocking the door, but behind him was Tommy Shelby in the flesh. Bareheaded and in shirtsleeves, suspenders hanging loose at his sides, undershirt just visible beneath his open collar. He hadn’t yet shaved.

“Thank you, Finn,” he dismissed. The kid sent him a dubious frown but disappeared back into the house without argument. “Alfie,” he greeted, pulling his suspenders up as he did. More unreadable than usual, which was something of an accomplishment, wasn’t it.

“Good morning to you too, mate.” 

Tommy just blinked at him and leaned one shoulder against the door frame with his arms crossed over his chest as if it was a casual maneuver and not at all like he was letting the entire fucking building hold him up. 

“Anyone take the trouble to inform you of your close resemblance to a lizard?” Alfie watched the words make their way through the clockwork in Tommy’s head and get caught in the gears.

“Oh?” was all the response he gave. It came a little delayed. 

“Yeah. You ever see one sunning itself on a rock, mate? Fiends for the sun, lizards.” Tommy’s gaze had taken on a vague sort of cast while Alfie talked. Not bored, exactly, but not precisely following along, either. “I saw a whole flock of ‘em once in Turkey--”

“Can I see the lizard, Dad?”

Alfie broke off at the small-voiced intrusion into his reptilian musings, to find a round face peeking out at him from behind Tommy Shelby’s trousers. A blonde boychild fully dressed in short pants and a knit vest and shiny brown shoes, unafraid and unabashedly curious about the stranger on his doorstep babbling about lizards.

Something hardened behind Tommy’s stare, not quite hostile yet but considering it. He pushed off from the door frame and did his utmost to fill up the space, one hand curling around the top of the boy’s head, mussing his hair, nudging him back from the open door.

“No lizards here,” he said, flatly. Then, without turning from Alfie: “Finn?”

A moment later the kid appeared and without a word swept the little one up to his hip and vanished again into the dark hall.

“Your boy?” Alfie noted, suddenly, that Tommy wasn’t wearing a holster, a fact that only came to his attention because Tommy looked very much like he wished he had a gun in his hand.

“I thought our business was finished.”

“Did you, now?” The problem was, he wasn’t exactly wrong. Alfie had no business being here, at Tommy Shelby’s home in exile, at seven o’clock in the fucking morning.

“Yeah.” The hostility was quickly becoming more than an idle consideration. Tommy might not be armed himself presently, but the whole fucking street was his garrison and on high alert as the Peaky crew was Alfie had no doubt he’d be picked off within seconds should he make a wrong move toward the boss.

“Seems to me you still had concerns as to the quality of your gin.”

“My what?” 

“Your new hobby, Tommy.”

Tommy’s mouth was pressed into a straight line and he looked, then, as worn out as Alfie felt. “You’re here to help me with my gin.”

Alfie didn’t let himself grin, unsure how Tommy would take it. “Unless there’s some other pressing matter with which you needed my help.”

“Right,” Tommy said. Either the kid brother had been hovering just out of sight behind him like some sort of squire or Tommy had gained the ability to conjure objects from thin air, because he was shrugging the leather straps of a holster over his shoulders and pulling on an overcoat. “Pay off that bloody driver, then, and come on.”

 

Someone had already restored the makeshift distillery to order, the table back in its place, the broken bottles swept up, no sign anything at all had happened there the day before. It was, in a word, pathological, wasn’t it, because chances were the fucking madman had done it himself, or he’d have had to come up with an explanation for the mess. Alfie adjusted his estimation of just how much sleep Tommy Shelby had gotten after his fit steeply downward. 

Tommy turned a lazy circle, his focus entirely on the wood-slat barrels of the stills. “I’m open to suggestions.” 

Alfie’s raised brow went ignored. So that’s how it was going to be. Bastard had come to Alfie’s hotel yesterday, hadn’t he? “Open to suggestions, right. Open to suggestions.” 

“About the gin.” Tommy’s back was to him now, head tilted to peer up at the pipes where the starlings were still twittering in their nests, and there was no way to take that but intentional. Question was, what was the nature of said intention?

“Yeah,” Alfie said, “I definitely took time out of my complicated fucking schedule to stay on another day in Birmingham and advise Tommy Shelby on his idle little hobby.” That got his attention, didn’t it. Tommy half-turned, gaze gone blade sharp for the first time since Alfie’d arrived at his doorstep. “I was under the impression you had something specific in mind yesterday, and it had fuck all to do with gin.”

“You made your disinterest in anything else clear enough.” It was said without any inflection whatsoever, as if he was talking about the fucking weather.

Ah. Well. That was it, then, wasn’t it. “In my recollection, the terms of my disinterest,” he said, drawing out the word, “was narrow in scope, yeah.”

“Yeah?” Tommy bit off. “And I have no fucking control over--”

Alfie gave him time to continue but he didn’t take it. “No fucking control over what, hm? Seems to me there’s something you do have control over when it comes to your unlucky affliction, mate, and--”

“It’s none of your fucking concern whether or not I take my bloody pills!” 

The scratch stood out livid against the cords in his neck. It was the closest Alfie’d seen Tommy come to losing grip on his fanatical self-discipline since he’d shoved a gun in his face and screamed at him about his boy. Which was… yeah, he supposed he’d had a small hand in bringing that on. This situation, though, nothing about it was his doing, was it. That was the whole fucking point. 

“You fucking made it my concern, didn’t you, when your brother nearly riddled me with fucking bullets while you was on the floor over there, non compos mentis.”

Whatever expression had been trying to fight its way to the surface of Tommy’s face slid back into careful, thorough blankness. Not a man who liked surprises much, Tommy, which must be something of a burden when the occasional convulsion mucked up all his plans.

“Yeah. Didn’t fill you in on that part, did he,” Alfie said. “Dunno what he thought I’d done to you, but he assumed the fucking worst. Which was better, I suppose, than him leaping to the correct conclusion, though odds are good the outcome wouldn’t have differed much if he had.”

They’d been behaving worse than fools, what with Alfie’s nephew sent off for a pint with the pikey with the hair and liable to wander back at any moment and the entire Shelby family apparently unable to stray more than twenty feet from their leader before getting twitchy.

“So, none of the rest of ‘em know?” Tommy quirked a brow at the question and yeah, alright, Alfie should have been more specific, given the context of the discussion at hand. “About the fits, see, because my meaning was obviously not--”

“No,” Tommy interrupted. Difficult to tell if he was lying, always was, but there was a hesitation to the word, so Alfie waited him out. The stiffness that had been there since Alfie’d pointed out his brain was taking its leave of him at the hotel eased a notch or two but didn’t entirely fade. “No one in the family knows.” 

Very precise choice of words, yeah. Which meant somebody knew, somebody who counted, somebody beyond whatever quack he’d failed to consult when he’d gone off his medication. Weren’t any of Alfie’s business, but curiousity had its claws in him now. As far as he could tell, since the mafia had come for him Tommy had been living cheek to jowl with his entire fucking gang in this packed little corner of Birmingham where there was one shithouse per address and half the block still hauled water in from the outside.

“Quitting barbituates cold don’t go unnoticed by the people around you, mate.”

Tommy leaned against one of the big pipes running through the place, hands thrust deep in his coat pockets. “If you had no plans to advise me on my distillery, and you’re _disinterested_ in any other activities, what exactly are we doing here, Alfie?”

So the withdrawal had been brutal, then, however he’d managed to hide it. “Didn’t say I had no interest, did I.”

Tommy stared at him. “In fact you were quite specific.”

“Last night, yeah. Last night you… fucking hell, Tommy. You was blinking out on me at the goddamn table and you wanted me to what, take you up to my room and fuck you?” That was apparently exactly what he’d wanted, if his face was anything to go by. “Right, yeah, well that ain’t gonna happen again, innit.”

Tommy looked away, jaw working. “What do you fucking want from me?”

“I told you the last time, after you had a go at expiring in my fucking bed.” He wasn’t going to say it again. Didn’t even know if Tommy remembered the conversation, the way he’d slid in and out that night, mostly coherent one moment and unconscious the next, and even when he’d been awake he’d tended to drift off for a few seconds here and there, eyes empty, before returning to himself. “You really didn’t know. That you was--”

“Blinking out?” Tommy pulled a silver case out of his coat pocket and took an overly long time selecting a cigarette, given they was all machine made and therefore fucking identical. Waited until he’d lit up to finish his thought. “No.”

Right. Well, Alfie supposed that must have been something to absorb, then.

He’d seen his share of fits, yeah, before his brother grew out of them, even seen one go on too long once; but he’d never been in bed with anyone, still sweat slick and sticking to each other, when their eyes rolled back and their body went rigid as a fucking plank under his own before they started thrashing about. And after that… for hours everything that made up Tommy Shelby had been blasted away, hadn’t it, like he’d had a fucking stroke, the clipped voice slurred and unsteady, the quick mind stumbling to follow half of what Alfie had said to him, so weakened he hadn’t been able to hold up a glass. Then when he’d finally recovered enough to swallow the dose of Luminal Alfie’d procured on short fucking notice and through channels he didn’t usually care to tap, Tommy’d gone more than a little vague, eyes dulled, the way he’d looked this morning at the door while Alfie had rattled on at him about--

Oh.

“Fuck me,” Alfie said, and started laughing. Then, at the affronted glower on Tommy’s face: “Right, it’s fucking freezing down here, innit. Might as well make use of that posh room I’ve paid a hefty sum to stand empty and unoccupied, yeah?”

Tommy just stared at him for a beat longer, like he was considering the odds on whether Alfie’d finally given in to incipient insanity, and then shrugged. “I’ve an appointment this afternoon I can’t miss,” he said. 

Given it was barely time for breakfast, Alfie supposed that was agreement.


	3. Chapter 3

Soon as the door to Alfie’s room was shut and locked Tommy had him up against the wall, thigh thrust between his legs, fingers plucking at the buttons of his shirt, mouth hot on his throat. Fuck. _Fuck._ A graze of teeth just above his collar and then Alfie shoved him off with a huff.

“Straight to business, innit Tommy, always straight to business with you.”

It had been like that the first time, Tommy glaring a challenge up at Alfie while he groped him through his trousers, like whether Alfie fucked him or killed him either way it would be what he wanted. 

“Thought you were after preventing your hard-earned money going to waste.” He was still wearing that damned impassive mask, though it was heavy-lidded now and had gained a bit  of color.

“Not paying by the hour, am I.” Alfie took the opportunity to shrug out of his overcoat and draped it over the back of a nearby chair. Piled his hat on top. “Not that sort of place.”

“I’m on a schedule,” Tommy said, and there was a hint of a smile around the edges of it, but he wasn’t joking, not really. An appointment, he’d said. Which was all he’d said about the matter, and Alfie didn’t expect to get much more out of him. 

“Right, well, if you don’t mind, this is my only spare clothing, yeah, because none of this was on _my_ fucking schedule at all, was it? So I’d rather keep my buttons and skip sending it all out to be laundered before I can decently venture into public again.”

“Hmm.” And that, that was Tommy’s bored face. He turned away and stalked further into the room, hands back in the pockets of his own coat like he wasn’t intending on staying, like he hadn’t just made his intentions perfectly clear. 

He poked his head into the gleaming bathroom and then prowled the perimeter of the suite, eyes tracing all the rich wood and brass as if this was the first proper hotel room he’d ever seen close up. Alfie supposed the both of them could count staying in a place even as middlingly posh as the Midland as an accomplishment, neither of them born to it. After that castle of a house in Warwickshire, though, he would have expected Tommy to take to Birmingham’s finest accommodations as his due; but instead he hovered as near to uncertain as Alfie’d seen him since the night he’d accidentally drunk himself into a stupor at the boxing ring, unused to the way his medication compounded the booze. The night before the first time they’d fucked, which had been in the morning too, come to think of it.

Tommy twitched aside the gauzy curtains to peer down at the road below, the faint shadow where he hadn’t shaved and the scrapes and bruises that marred the side of his face and the incomplete suit all marking him somehow out of place in this room. After he’d finished his inspection he drifted back to the door to the bathroom, taking in the porcelain tile like he’d forgotten Alfie was even there.

“Sorry to say, but the privies in this place flush, mate,” Alfie said. “I can show you the mechanism if you’ve forgotten how it all works.”

And that was an altogether different sort of lack of expression now, wasn’t it. For a moment Alfie was certain Tommy’d head straight out the door again, intentions be damned, but instead he turned his back on the bathroom and on Alfie and lit a cigarette.

“Next you’ll tell me I don’t have to heat water for the bath,” he said, conversational enough, but with an edge Alfie decided not to touch.

Or not directly. “How long you been in Small Heath, then?” 

“I was born in Small Heath.” Which didn’t answer the question, or at least not the obvious spirit of the question, which had been about his current circumstances, hadn’t it. From what Alfie had gathered it’d been at least two months since he’d left his big house. His big house with its maids and chef and electric lights and indoor plumbing and no neighbors for kilometers.

Tommy took up position at the window again, focused as a sharp-shooter, keeping his center mass out of view, wisps of smoke drifting around his head. 

Fucking hell, maybe it had been a bad idea, this hotel. Alfie crossed the room and pulled the heavy drapes over both sets of windows, blocking out the cool morning light and the street below with its motley stream of cars and lorries and the occasional horse and wagon. Tommy just watched him, the ember of his cigarette glowing in the sudden, unnatural gloom. 

He shouldn’t have stopped things, before. Now the timing was all off, the moment slipping towards lost, both of them too much in their heads, Tommy gone distant again. But the important thing, yeah, was that so far he’d stayed present in his fucking eyes. Which might have been the medication’s doing, or might just mean whatever storm had overtaken him the day before had passed for the time being. 

What the drug didn’t effect was his ability to keep anything about what he was actually thinking off his face entirely, because he was, of course, a world class artist of the bluff. Something to do with that cold-fish visage he walked around with, like he already knew what you was going to say and the boredom at the mere thought of it was killing him. Pulling a gun on him only made it worse, didn’t it. Not that Alfie disagreed with the sentiment; pulling a gun on men like them was more admittance of failure than threat. Point was, most of the time Tommy didn’t show nothing he didn’t want you to see. Unless you learned where to look. And even then it was high odds you’d get it right.

“Alfie,” Tommy was still watching him from two feet away, close enough to punch, his cigarette burned down to a nub in his fingers. “You mentioned a need to preserve your bloody clothing.” Like it was a warning. 

Alfie blinked. Tommy was waiting on _him_? Fuck. Suppose that was fair, since Alfie’d been the one to put a damper on matters before they could get properly started. “So you’ll be keeping the overcoat on, then, is that it?”

The corner of Tommy’s mouth quirked and he brushed past to stub his cigarette out in the ashtray left on the mirror-topped dresser across from the bed. Then he turned and leaned back against the dresser and just fucking stood there, casually aloof. Waiting. 

Right. Fine. Alfie pulled his jacket and waistcoat off and finished unbuttoning his shirt and if Tommy Shelby lit another cigarette he was going to make him fucking eat the thing. Tommy must have caught the sentiment because he set the silver case he’d pulled from his coat pocket down on the dresser beside the ashtray, then left his lighter on top. 

“Not here to give you a show, mate,” Alfie grumbled. 

A parade of responses marched over the planes of Tommy’s face but none of them made it to his mouth, which was probably for the best, yeah, because they was both still armed. Was that fucking it? Alfie rolled his eyes and stripped off his holster, wound the leather straps around his gun, then tossed the whole fucking thing towards Tommy, who caught it one-handed out of reflex, one brow raised in what was most likely amusement. 

“There anything left to negotiate, hmm, or can we get on with it?”

Tommy dropped the gun to the dresser. “So all that by the door, that was just about your fucking suit, eh?”

“What?”

He crossed his arms over his chest. “I’ve paid your bloody blackmail, Alfie. That’s the only guarantee I can fucking give you.”

“Blackmail?”

“Yeah.”

“Fuck. You did it for your own fucking reasons, eleven of which came to this fine country on a fucking boat to Liverpool, right. Blackmail.”

“Don’t change the fucking subject.”

“What subject would that be, mate, because seems to me we was talking about your starlings and--”

“Fine,” Tommy snapped. He scooped up his cigarette case and lighter and shoved them in his pocket and started for the exit. 

Alfie caught him before he could reach the door, pinning him to the wall with one arm across his chest, a grip on the wrist of his gun hand just to be safe. Tommy’d gained some solid breadth in the year since they’d last fucked, like he’d been moonlighting as a blacksmith when he wasn’t playing amateur distiller and buying up factories like they was trinkets and hiding out from the mafia while his kestrel did his hunting for him. Alfie still outweighed him. Didn’t erase the fact that at this point a good shove and he’d most likely end up on his arse, but maybe Tommy hadn’t realized that yet, and probably -- probably -- he was looking to be stopped, since he just stood there, staring at Alfie, and made no move to free himself. 

“Make up your fucking mind,” Tommy said, and there was weariness under it all, though it didn’t show in any obvious way Alfie could have pointed to. 

“Not the one looking to leave, was I.” 

Tommy’s chin lifted. “S’not as if you don’t know what to do in the unlikely event it happens again.”

Spoken like a man who’d never had to fish the sick out of a bedmate’s throat to get them breathing, since he’d been the one turning fucking blue. “Fuck you.” 

“Apparently not, eh?”

Alfie’d left his cane somewhere across the room and had given Tommy his fucking gun and if he let go long enough to throw a punch Tommy’d have him on the floor for certain, without that smug expression shifting an inch.

“It happens again, this time I’m letting you fucking choke,” Alfie spat. “And when your thick fucking brother tries to kill me for it, I’ll have him cut into pieces so small that after they’re scattered it’ll take a year for your people to gather enough for one of your fucking bonfires.”

Tommy’s eyes flickered and went dead, his wrist tensing in Alfie’s hand. 

“Arthur will gut you before you can leave Birmingham,” he said, flat and hard. 

Shit, he’d forgotten about the younger brother. The cocky bloke the Italians had rubbed out in his own drive. “That a threat or a fucking warning, mate?” 

“It’s not going to happen again,” Tommy said. “So the distinction is bloody worthless.”

Alfie leaned in, closing the gap left between them, still pissed. “Redid the odds after yesterday and they’re telling a different story, aren’t they.”

“Alfie.” It came a little breathless, because at some point his forearm had slid upward to the base of Tommy’s throat without thought. He would have pulled away, except Tommy was pressing against him now, head tilted back, stare gone unfocused with want. His free hand, the one Alfie wasn’t pinning to the wall, drifted up Alfie’s leg to grip his arse through his trousers.

“Fuck the odds,” Tommy said, and Alfie kissed him.

Tommy pulled Alfie’s shirts free of his trousers and ran his hand up the skin of his back, tracing the line of his spine. Alfie tongued the scratch on his neck and made the determination he needed both hands more than he needed to be certain Tommy wouldn’t shoot him, so let the wrist go and shoved the overcoat back from Tommy’s shoulders until he got the message and shrugged out of it, letting it fall to the floor. Which left the holster, but Alfie wasn’t about to touch that, twitchy as he’d been. The suspenders and the buttons of his shirt, though, those he could do something about. Tommy’s teeth were back on his throat, his hands slipping beneath the waistband of Alfie’s trousers, scraping his nails down the small of his back. 

“Fuck,” Alfie breathed. 

“Yeah,” Tommy agreed, as Alfie found the buttons to his trousers.

Alfie let him push off the wall, trousers gaping open, both of them half-undressed, Tommy’s mouth chasing his, already panting a little. Alfie didn’t do great walking in reverse, so it was lucky Tommy had the reflexes to back towards the bed while pulling Alfie’s shirts over his head, toeing off his own shoes and socks as he went. If he hadn’t had other more urgent matters on his mind Alfie would have been impressed at the sheer fucking skill. 

“Tommy,” he managed. “Lose the gun, yeah?”

Tommy ignored him, sinking to his haunches to untie Alfie’s shoelaces, which was just… fuck. It should have fucking bothered him, right, but instead a wave of heat rolled through him, his fingers carding through Tommy’s hair as Tommy pulled his trousers down around his ankles so he could step out of the whole mess. Which left his shorts, but Tommy’s hands were on his calves, tracing their way upwards, and fuck if he wasn’t nearly naked now, giving Tommy the show he’d insisted wasn’t going to fucking happen. Then the bastard had his shorts down and his mouth on Alfie’s cock before he’d quite expected it. He was only half-hard, but _fuck._ His head fell back, his breath catching, then Tommy was on his feet again, sauntering away. Still mostly dressed. 

Leaving Alfie, cock still twitching, to follow.

Right.

Tommy stripped off the holster -- finally -- and left it on the table next to the bed, paranoid fuck that he was, then bent over to switch on a lamp, flooding the room with gold. Alfie felt his gaze trace the raw patches of skin on his torso and chest and shoved down a surge of fury at it by crossing the room to rid him of the rest of his fucking clothes, but by the time he got there, Tommy’d already lost both his shirts, the light picking out the newly defined muscles of his abdomen. Alfie palmed his cock through his shorts and backed him up again until he sank down onto the mattress, face tilted up, flushed pink under the scrapes, lips parted and eyes narrowed as he sprawled back, legs spread. Alfie pulled his trousers free of his hips while Tommy unbuttoned his own shorts, freeing his cock, the breath rushing out of him as Alfie gave it a quick stroke and then let him go. 

He managed an awkward half-fall until he was able to crawl onto the bed and Tommy shifted and followed him, shedding his shorts as he went, his hands sliding up Alfie’s flank, careful of the sore spots as he settled between his thighs. It’d been a long fucking time, yeah, and Alfie bucked at the contact, overwhelmed. Tommy shoved back, mouth searing his again, hips pushing against him, their cocks sliding together. Then Tommy was pressing a bottle of oil into his hand, fuck knows where he’d fucking had the thing hidden, but Alfie was too far gone to give it more consideration, because Tommy was nipping at his bottom lip, fucking into his mouth with his tongue. So Alfie poured some of the oil down the cleft of his arse and followed it with his fingers, pressing inward until Tommy let out a rough sound low in his throat, eyes closed. 

A year ago it hadn’t happened until they was done with the fucking, and yesterday it had been before they’d even touched, but there was nothing that said a fit wouldn’t strike right in the middle of things, was there. But so far Tommy hadn’t gone AWOL on him, just been slightly blurred, and that was only the Luminal. 

Once Alfie’d realized, it had been obvious, yeah. For one, Tommy hadn’t offered to drive them to the hotel, instead pulling a man from the betting shop, a tough he called Scudboat, which seemed an unlikely given name, but then he was in a gang called themselves the Peaky Blinders so maybe ridiculous fucking names went with the territory. He’d just told his man to take them to the Midland and offered no explanation whatsoever for what business they had there or why he wasn’t driving himself. Scudboat seemed used to it, though Alfie did catch a couple of curious glances in the rearview mirror. 

And Tommy’d been a bit slow on the uptake at first, by a fraction of a second, but it was enough to notice, if you was looking for it. If Alfie rambled on for longer than a few sentences at a time a haze fell over his eyes, not one that was meant to convey how tedious he found the whole situation but was still tracking every bit of what you’d said, no, but one he didn’t know was there, because he hadn’t caught on to the fact that he was losing the thread entirely. So Alfie’d filled the trip with nonsense about starlings and the various other vermin that might invade one’s distillery if one wasn’t vigilant. The fog had seemed to burn away during the ride, and when the car finally came to a stop, Tommy told his man he’d find his own way back and was already starting up the steps to the hotel before Alfie was quite out of the fucking car.

“Are you going to take the entire day with this?” Tommy panted, startling him out of his brooding, two fingers deep. Gripping Alfie’s upper arms for leverage, he shoved himself upward until he was straddling his hips. “I have places to fucking be.”

“Places to fucking be,” Alfie muttered. His cock had hardened heedless of his distraction, bumping against Tommy’s arse every time he moved. Alfie grabbed it by the base, eyes slitting at the touch. “Always in such a fucking hurry, Tommy.”

Tommy’s eyelids fluttered closed as Alfie guided himself home, then he rocked back, taking him in full with a hiss that might have been pain, because he’d rushed things, hadn’t he, but it was too late now and Tommy wasn’t stopping anyhow. He hauled Alfie up to sit against the headboard, another low sound torn from him as the underside of his cock rubbed against Alfie’s belly, squeezed between their bodies, already leaking. 

“Fuck--” Alfie groaned, and leaned in to bite at one of Tommy’s nipples and lick his way to the rough skin of a healed bullet wound. Tommy’s head fell forward and he clenched around Alfie, his lips grazing the side of his neck, breath puffing out against his shoulder, small sounds escaping him with every push back onto Alfie’s cock. 

And then the rhythm spiraled out of either of their control and there was just the rattle of the headboard against the wall and the humid slap of their flesh and the squeal of the mattress under them, Tommy doing most of the work, the muscles of his thighs standing out from the effort. Alfie lost track of everything but Tommy’s mouth on his and the heat around his cock and the glow spreading through his belly that chased the lingering aches away until he forgot his own fucking bag of bones was failing him, worse every day. Then he stuttered and saw white and everything became slick and pulsing, his body an animal with its own drive, grunting and rutting up into Tommy, gripping his hips, fingers digging into the shifting muscle. He shoved a hand between them, Tommy’s cock slippery in his grip as his thumb found the swollen head and Tommy moaned, once, and went rigid, sitting back hard in Alfie’s lap as warmth flooded his fist. Then he dropped forward, a sweaty weight on Alfie’s chest, heart pounding against Alfie’s, still gasping.

“Sometimes you bet against the odds and win,” he rasped, after he’d caught enough breath to speak, propping himself up with one hand against the headboard next to Alfie’s ear.

“When the race isn’t fucking fixed, maybe,” Alfie said, but it was drained of heat. His softened cock slid free as he ran his hands up Tommy’s sweat-damp back to cup his skull, fingers running through his hair, only to fumble over the ridge of a long curved scar on the side of his head and the healed notch in the bone underneath.


	4. Chapter 4

Sometimes, after he came, there’d be a moment where Tommy Shelby was a different man altogether. Languid and loose-limbed, heavy-lidded, voice softened up and slowed to a drawl, flushed all over. He’d even laughed, once, a bona fide expression of amusement, all calculation fallen away like a carapace, taking ten years with it. It was a drug Alfie could get used to, bringing Tommy to that state. As brief as it ever lasted.

This time, though, Tommy’d sunk into sleep before the sweat even dried. 

That hadn’t been unusual for daytime trysts, back when they’d been doing this at Alfie’s place, though typically there’d been a little more time in between fucking and out cold. Tommy’d even stay that way for a couple hours if Alfie left him alone. It was nighttime he had a problem with; if he fell asleep at night within half an hour he’d be up again, prowling the bedroom, or leaving altogether, if only for the room down the hall. Where on occasion he’d stayed until morning, though as far as Alfie’d ever been able to tell he spent most of his time sitting at one window, smoking.

Alfe’s own problems with sleep were of a different nature, but since Tommy had never made it through an entire night in his bed, he’d been spared that indignity. Namely, that getting to sleep at all tended to be a chore and if he spent more than a couple hours there these days he couldn’t fucking get up right away.

So yeah, Tommy’d been asleep a good hour and despite being unconscious and the matter presumably out of his direct control, approached it the way he did everything else: with a relentless seriousness. There was a line between his brows and his mouth was turned down and he was not anything close to what you would call relaxed. A quarter hour more and his head jerked to the side on the pillow and he bolted upright on a harsh gasp and Alfie let him be, because when he woke like this he didn’t hear anything in the room with him and touching him tended to go poorly for both of them.

“Tommy,” he ventured, after a long minute of listening to him struggle to drag air in as if he had to fight to keep hold of it.

Tommy turned toward him, wide-eyed and scraped down to bedrock by lingering terror. Then he blinked, scanning the room, scanning Alfie, and swallowed.

“Your socks are still on,” he said, voice stripped.

His socks where indeed still on, even if the garters had slipped down around his ankles. Nonsensical as it was, the observation was a sign Tommy’d joined him in the here and now, so he’d take it. “And whose fault is that, yeah?”

Not quite up to joking yet though, was he. Tommy swiped at his face with both hands and dug his fingers into his eye sockets. “What time is it?” he asked, muffled.

“Seeing as how my watch is somewhere across the room, mate, I’m afraid--”

Tommy dropped his hands with a huff and slid from the bed. There was a small clock on the dresser which neither of them could read from the bed without the aid of spectacles. He picked the thing up and squinted at it and made another impatient sound as he set it back down again, then crossed to where his overcoat had dropped and fished out his cigarette case and lighter.

“You got time in your tight fucking schedule for breakfast?” Alfie asked as Tommy lit his cigarette, mind obviously somewhere else entirely. 

The faint tremor was back in his left hand and he seemed no more aware of it now than he had the night before, because if he’d been aware he would have worked to conceal it, wouldn’t he. Alfie’d judged it an after-effect of the fit; but maybe it was something else altogether, given the size of the indentation in the right side of his fucking skull. 

Tommy glanced at him like he’d forgotten Alfie was even in the room. “It’s after eleven,” he said, as if that meant something.

“For what I’m paying they’ll bring us whatever I ask them for.”

“I need to make a call.” Which wasn’t an answer. 

He wasn’t going to focus on anything else until he’d satisfied whatever it was distracting him, so Alfie just sat back in the pillows and waited him out. This being a posh sort of place there was a phone on a little stand in the entryway. Tommy didn’t bother with clothes or with hiding anything from Alfie, just gave the operator a Small Heath number and waited. 

“Yeah, Finn? Who’s watching Charlie?” Smoke curled around his hunched shoulders as he leaned against the wall, broad back to Alfie. There was a splash of ugly purple-brown above his tail bone that had been there before they’d fucked, probably from where he’d crashed into the table in the distillery as he’d gone down. “No. No, put him on.” Then a moment later: “Yeah, Charlie, it’s me. Yeah? You what? Good boy. Okay. In a little while, yeah? No, listen to Finn, you stay inside today. Alright.” He ended the call, let out a sharp breath, and asked the operator for another number, one Alfie recognized as his office in Digbeth. “The afternoon’s still blocked out, right? Eh? No, I’ll take Michael the papers myself, I’ll pick them up on the way. Lizzie, no. Tomorrow. Yeah, I know tomorrow’s Saturday, if Bird wants a meeting he can fucking come on Saturday.” He dropped the phone back onto the receiver and just stood there, finishing his cigarette.

“The American,” Alfie said, after the silence had stretched on too long. “He had a man in your house, yeah? I hear it got messy.” The glare Tommy turned on him made Alfie glad the guns weren’t within his immediate reach. “You asked me to look into Sabini, didn’t you,” Alfie continued, evenly. “Well, word got back to him, right, of course it did, because you meant it to. The poor bloke who’d worked for you could barely spit out two words about it, but he was clear about the meat hook, yeah, and the blood.”

He’d thought he could prod Tommy into spilling more information about the whole situation, but Tommy crossed back to the dresser and stubbed out his cigarette, the ashtray rattling from the force. A muscle jumped in his jaw as he scooped up his clothes and then his shoes and disappeared into the bathroom, the lock clicking behind him. 

He’d taken his gun, Alfie noted.

Room service had been a grand idea, and Alfie was even faintly hungry, but given the telephone was across the room it was a plan doomed from the start. Because when he attempted to swing his legs around to stand, a flash of agony ran from his hip straight up his back, so intense his vision greyed out until he sat back again, carefully, against the pillows, and held perfectly still awhile. The fact he could see his cane on the floor three feet from the bed just compounded matters, because if it’d been within reach he might have been able to lever himself upright, pain be damned. As it was he wasn’t going nowhere without help, and fuck if he’d ask Tommy Shelby to haul him upright, even if Tommy hadn’t just barricaded himself in the bathroom, on edge and armed to the teeth.

Given Tommy’d been living without proper plumbing for a few months, Alfie’d half expected him to take up residence in the tub for a bit. Would do him good, probably, wouldn’t it, maybe finish the job fucking obviously hadn’t and relax him; but whatever agenda he’d set for himself apparently didn’t allow such luxuries because it couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes before the door to the bathroom opened again and Tommy emerged, hair wet and pushed back from his forehead, dressed in what clothes he’d been wearing that morning when Alfie’d shown up at his door. Which meant he was missing his collar and tie and waistcoat and jacket, but the holster was back in place, because of course it was. 

He sent Alfie a curious glance and eyed the clock. Then, without comment, picked up the phone again and put in an order for a full breakfast -- no, no bacon or sausage -- with room service.

Alfie needed another hot soak, badly. Maybe he’d have a chance of walking upright again today if he did; problem was getting to the fucking tub. The sex, yeah, no matter how good -- and it was always fucking good, that was the problem, wasn’t it, it had been fucking good right before Tommy’d gone into convulsions on him last year, too -- hadn’t exactly been beneficial for the state of Alfie’s back any more than it had eased the brittle tension in Tommy himself, had it. If anything Tommy seemed more tightly wound than he’d been before he’d cleaned himself up. A success all around. He’d hoped to have been able to move before Tommy finished in the bath, but that hadn’t fucking happened. So now Alfie was stuck in the fucking bed and beginning to wish Tommy’d just fucking leave for whatever very important business was obviously on his mind and spare him further humiliation.

“Was it the gas, did that?” Tommy asked, idly, after he’d hung up the phone. 

Whatever soporific effect his medication had on him -- the reason, Alfie suspected, he’d risked going without in the first place, his situation with the mafia being what it was -- seemed to have been cleared by the fucking, or by nerves, or maybe just time passing since his last dose.  Because he’d returned to his usual diamond-sharp self, which wasn’t the sort of scrutiny Alfie was much up to withstanding at the moment, trapped as he was, still smelling of sex and wearing only dried sweat and the souvenirs from the war which bloomed continuously on his skin no matter what salves he soothed them with.

Alfie shoved down the urge to cover himself with the blankets. “Did what?” 

Tommy let it go, wise lad that he was, but then, maddingly, nodded towards the black leather case Alfie’d left on the dresser that morning. “You need anything from that?” And fucking hell if he was going to sit here while Tommy looked at him like he needed anything at all. “Sciatica, right? D’you take anything for it?”

This was some kind of obscure revenge, wasn’t it, for all of Alfie’s haranguing about his fucking Luminal. It was more than sciatica and more than the rashes and of course he had his own array of treatments, even took morphine when it got too fucking bad, but he wasn’t about to discuss any of it with Thomas Shelby, O.B.E., now, was he. Before he could summon any kind of response that wasn’t pure profanity, there was a knock at the door. Tommy turned away and he heard him tell whoever it was to charge it to the room and then he reappeared, a tray with a covered dish and a pot of tea balanced in his hands. 

A single covered dish, because naturally he’d ordered for one.

“Off to your appointment, then.” Alfie managed to bite back every curse he knew the meaning of and a few he only knew how to pronounce, and felt quite pleased with himself about his success.

Tommy set the tray down on the foot of the bed and swept him with that critical gaze again, this time gone a little heavy as it lingered somewhere around Alfie’s cock, where it nestled, still exhausted, between his legs. “Hmm,” he agreed. “In a bit. Back to London this afternoon?”

“Your schedule being full as it is today--”

“It is,” Tommy said. There was a disquieting sort of finality to the words. He went still, then, like Alfie’d found him out, even though Alfie had no idea what was so fucking important about whatever bullshit it was he’d planned for the rest of his fucking day, and truely didn’t give a damn about any of it, now they were done with their own business. Meetings with a bunch of Birmingham toffs, most likely, given his ventures into respectable industry.  “Alfie--”

“Fuck off, mate.” Alfie said, congenially. “Send me a telegram when you book an arena for the fight.”

Tommy just gave him a short nod, nicked his overcoat from its heap on the floor, and disappeared, the door shutting quietly behind him.

It took a little effort but Alfie was able to reach the end of the bed and pull the tray towards him, and when he did, he saw that at some point Tommy’d propped his cane against the footboard.

So he took his time, yeah, had himself a leisurely meal and a cup of tea, after which he managed to hobble his way in to the bathroom for a hot bath, leaning on his cane like someone’s grandfather. And by the time he’d gotten himself mostly mobile, checked out of the hotel and made it into a cab to the train station, seemed the entire Birmingham police force was out mucking up the streets. 

“What’s all the fuss about, then,” Alfie asked the cabbie. 

“Shooting in Small Heath,” the bloke said. “Bloody gangsters. One of them had a Lewis gun, can you believe that? Haven’t seen one of those beasts since France. Christ, what this city is coming to.”

Right. If Alfie had any thoughts about that, he didn’t take the time to entertain them. No fucking point, was there.

The train to London was uncomfortable and bored him to tears, but Ollie’d sent a car to pick him up at the station so he didn’t have to limp far when he got there, which was something of a relief. The distillery had fallen into its usual state of barely-controlled chaos in his absence, and it took him into dinnertime to wrestle everything back into proper order. It’d only required a small bit of shouting and a couple of gruff talking-tos overall, so Alfie considered the day more productive than he’d expected, really, and finally satisfied, had his driver take him home. 

Where there was a telegram waiting for him with the rest of the mail.

KESTREL INSUFFICIENT. TOOK ALTERNATIVE MEASURES. 

DETAILS ON MATCH WITH GOLIATH FORTHCOMING.

Alfie had contacts with the Birmingham coppers, but the news hadn’t been anything he didn’t expect: three dead Italians who’d been in Britain on tourist visas, a tenement full of terrified civilians, no arrests, nobody willing to talk.

But hundred to one, the pikey with the hair didn’t have a fucking Lewis gun on hand, did he.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I set out to just have them bang, because wow, Alfie admiring Tommy's blue eyes and commenting on how he smells in 4.04 is kind of a lot?? But then plot and feelings happened, apparently neither character was over the events of the previous story.
> 
> Title from "Mourning Sound" by Grizzly Bear.


End file.
